Orbital Velocity. Don Pendleton

at from video footage and the oblique shapes of the impact craters.

      McCarter looked at the bartender. Though he’d lost most of his accent, McCarter still could hear a touch of Polish in his speech.

      Manning’s look was quizzical in response to the pub man’s comment. He turned to his friend for an explanation. “Britneys?”

      “Rhyming slang,” McCarter explained. “Britney Sp—”

      “Her name rhymes with beers,” Manning cut him off. “How’d she get across the pond to influence London barkeeps?”

      “Sitting naked in music videos does a lot to improve international popularity,” McCarter answered. He looked at the bartender. “Two more pints, mate.”

      “The Babel concept,” Manning muttered. “Languages are far from immutable, more like living creatures. Viruses actually.”

      “Language is a virus?” McCarter asked.

      “More appropriately, an information virus,” Manning told him. “Viruses are a part of this planet. The first transfer of information was in the form of a virus, one simple organism transmitting DNA code to another in the creation of life. All data is viral in nature, be it a new word in a language or a catchy set of lyrics in a song. Every bit of information is a single permutation of that first virus.”

      McCarter looked at the pad on which the Canadian demolitions expert had been calculating trajectories. “What about those angles? Did someone put a satellite in orbit right over Moscow?”

      Manning tapped the end of his pen against his chin. McCarter could see a brilliant light working behind the Canadian’s eyes. “We don’t have footage of their whole approach. All I can tell is that they came in off of a supra orbital arc. Whether it was akin to the supergun or a satellite-mounted kinetic weapons system I couldn’t tell without proper examination of their approach vectors. Even then we’d be dealing with over-the-horizon launches.”

      “You know, maybe the Farm picked up something,” McCarter offered.

      Manning shook his head. “Unlikely. A release of kinetic darts would have a minimal thermal profile. There’s no indication of any rocket thrusters so they would be untrackable except when they hit the atmosphere. Then the friction of their passage through the air would provide for infrared tracking, but we’re looking at trailing a projectile at thousands of feet per second…”

      “Terminal velocity. We experienced that kind of speed ourselves,” McCarter replied.

      “A little too closely,” Manning returned. He smiled. “I bet you had the time of your life playing bumper cars with space shuttles.”

      McCarter held up his thumb and forefinger to indicate a small amount. “A bit, mate.”

      Manning chuckled, and McCarter looked away from him, his eye catching something going on in the corner. He’d come to the pub to watch the two booths full of young men wearing football jerseys. He counted twelve of them, all shaved-headed, with faces that looked as if they’d taken multiple punches over the years. These were soccer hooligans if they were anything, a breed of troublemaker with whom McCarter was quite familiar. A couple of them were looking at their cell phones, the brightly glowing LCD screens reflecting in their eyes lending them a haunting, soulless appearance.

      “Gary, you know all about technology. What’s it called when groups assemble due to instant messages?” McCarter asked.

      “Flash mobs,” Manning answered immediately. “Given a proper network of like-minded people, flash mobs are hard, almost impossible to anticipate and difficult to track. Why?”

      McCarter nodded toward the hooligans who were assembled at the two booths. Manning narrowed his eyes, studying the group as the two men with the cell phones pocketed them and gestured to the other jersey-clad men. The group threw down their money on the table for the waitress to scoop up as she took their order for the current round. In a London pub, you paid before you got your alcohol. She returned with a tray of lager bottles, which the hoodlums grabbed off her tray. Where they had been garrulous moments before, now they had fallen into silence.

      “As always, good instincts,” Manning noted. “There’s no game on tonight, and these guys are in a hurry for something.”

      “We’ve got a little bit of time before we’re called in. Let’s see where they’re headed,” McCarter suggested.

      Manning nodded. He left a tip for the bartender and the two men exited the pub, staying back but still within sight of the small mob of ruffians. Both Manning and McCarter were members of Phoenix Force, the foreign-operations strike team of Stony Man Farm. McCarter had summoned Manning to London to assist him in checking out rumors that someone had been organizing the roughhousing young men of the hooligan scene. There had already been plenty of arrests of more enterprising hooligan gangs doing muscle work for organized crime and street-corner drug dealing. This had been part of a disturbing trend from London to Vladivostok. The clique mentality of the thuggish sports fans had given the roughnecks an impetus to organize, and they had found plenty of opportunity to make money from mayhem and destruction.

      McCarter frowned. “Viruses tend to spread in patterns, right?”

      Manning nodded. “Especially social constructs.”

      McCarter’s frown deepened. “This isn’t the normal kind of sport fan. These are ruffians who have taken their social ostracism and turned it into gang mentality. In the U.S., street gangs are nothing like the Crips and Bloods who developed in the 1970s into gun-wielding thugs. But right here, we’re seeing the same kind of evolutionary changes occurring among the hooligans.”

      “In order to fund their lifestyle, they commit robberies or they sell drugs,” Manning agreed. “And they could increase their level of violence—”

      “As if they aren’t savage enough in hand-to-hand,” McCarter interrupted.

      “Then you don’t want to imagine them with shotguns or rifles,” Manning said.

      McCarter nodded. He kept his eye on the group. He’d kept watch over them all morning. The soccer thugs had been on a pub crawl all night long, and it was close to nine now. So far, he had Stony Man’s cybernetics teams studying Twitter notification streams and other text message hubs to look for signs of organized communication networks. The young men were now on the move soon after a near apocalyptic event in Moscow. McCarter couldn’t believe that this was a coincidence.

      He pulled his phone and sent a secure text to the Farm, hoping to catch someone’s attention.

      “Hooligans in motion. Copy?”

      There was no response, and the Briton wrinkled his nose. Of course the Farm wasn’t going to take the electronic organization of London street gangs as a priority over a high-powered strike on a major international capital. He looked over at Manning, who gripped the strap of his backpack. Both McCarter and his Canadian partner were well-armed with handguns and knives, but the satchel contained more potent equipment.

      McCarter was someone who had a predisposition to action and had developed a level of lethal ruthlessness when dealing with opponents who had no qualms about murder. However, the thought of opening fire on unarmed foes was something that the Special Air Service veteran found abhorrent. Manning’s backpack had a pair of shotguns, but the twelve-gauge weapons were filled with nonlethal shells. The initial loads inside the pistol-gripped pumps were tear-gas-spewing ferret rounds, but there were bandoliers filled with mixed gas and spongy baton rounds. While the ammunition wasn’t intended to be deadly, they could kill if Manning or McCarter chose their shots carefully.

      McCarter felt that if he was going to drop an assailant permanently, he’d use either his beloved 9 mm Browning Hi-Power or his new backup pistol, a Springfield Armory Enhanced Micro Pistol. The EMP was also a 9 mm pistol, and it also shared the same mechanism that allowed him to carry the Browning locked and cocked; the EMP was simply a resized version of the Hi-Power’s cousin, the John Moses Browning–designed 1911 pistol. The flat EMP fit easily